Rumored iPhone OS 3.0 copy and paste explained

Founder of social news site Digg and random Apple rumor courier Kevin Rose claims to have a handful of details on what Apple will announce in its iPhone OS 3.0 unveiling tomorrow. Among Rose's mentionable tidbits is that copy and paste should finally arrive, and he even offered a believable explanation, a clip of which is embedded below, of how the feature will work.

Rose explains that, in iPhone OS 3.0, double-tapping a word will display a magnifying-glass-like icon that contains two draggable quotation marks. Drag the marks around the word or chunk of text you want to copy, and a contextual menu will appear, offering options to copy or paste. This sounds fairly plausible, and at least as good of a UI implementation as any of the previous mockups of how this feature could work. It is worth noting that Rose has a pretty good Apple rumor track record, nailing some announcements like the 4G iPod nano, the original iPhone, and iTunes 8. The full Diggnation episode (number 194), recorded live at SXSW this past weekend, is not yet up on the Revision3 Diggnation site. You will have to deal with the brief clips for now. Unfortunately, Rose does not get into specifics of just how far this copy and paste functionality will reach.

Google's Android smartphone OS, for example, only allows the feature to shuffle around words in text boxes. Will iPhone OS 3.0 allow users to copy text from a webpage and paste it into an e-mail or a text box on the page for posting to forums? What about more ad-hoc behavior, such as copying details from a profile in the Facebook app for pasting into the iPhone's internal Address Book?

If Rose is right that copy and paste is indeed coming, these questions will hopefully be answered tomorrow at Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 media sneak peek. Ars will cover the event live from Apple's Town Hall, so stay tuned.

In what universe did Rose "nail" the announcement of the original iPhone? Here's what he said according to the very article you linked to:

quote:

GSM, CDMA, and possibly iDen...the iPhone has two batteries, one for the MP3 portion of it and one for the phone...I think we're talking $249 and $449, like a pretty big price difference between the four and eight gigs...slide-out keyboard.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. Aside from the fact that Apple DID release a phone, he wasn't even close!

I think copy/paste will be something like this. There are only so many finger gestures available so it seems like it has to be modal somehow. Double tap isn't currently used so would work to shift into selection mode. I imagined they would use a drag and drop model rather than a context menu. In any case, hopefully they come up with something more clever than I imagine.

The iPhone doesn't have copy/paste because the designers did not consider it essential. The iPhone UI looks like it was built from the ground up from scratch. It inherits conventions from desktop applications of course and also from other mobile application. It's that they didn't start with the goal of recreating the Mac experience on the phone. If they had done that we would have a file system, application switching, a dock, etc.

Cut and paste will be nice, but when can we store and view regular files on our non-jailbroken iPhones? Every file viewing app I've encountered downloads the file on demand. That and a second analog stick.

Holy shit. Was that was SXSW was like? It's "Wayne's World 2.0". Party on Kevin! Party on other annoying guy.

Wow, I feel, so totally, OMG, thrilled that Kevin thought back in his ultra-cool memory and told us what his friend of a friend that knows a guy that lives on the same street as someone who went to school with someone who takes the trash out at Apple.

If 3.0 include copy and paste, then users sticking with older firmware versions may well become a non-issue even for iPod Touch users. Put simply, who is going to want to stay on a version that doesn't have it (unless you're jailbroken, of course) even it costs money.